She was big and ugly.

My third-grade teacher used to stand over me with pursed lips and her dark female mustache quivering as her face twisted into a phantasmagorical sneer. She would rap my desk with one of her hairy-knuckled, knobby fingers while showing me the finer points of penmanship.

She was the pure embodiment of all that was wholly frightening to an eight-year-old boy. This was in the days when children watched scary movies, read scary comics and weren’t sheltered from everything slightly that side of wholesome. That meant I had seen my share of bugbears and boogeymen and I was absolutely sure that at that moment, I was staring at pure evil.

Nevertheless, my fellow third-grade runts and I spent those long afternoons bent over our desks, tongues jutting from our mouths, gripping our No. 2 pencils with a fury better suited to slaying dragons than to toughing out the alphabet.

I was the class idiot who thought it wise to ask one day why we were spending so much time on our penmanship when all the adults I knew wrote just slightly better than Cro-Magnon man did when all he had for ink was some squashed up batshit and a gob of saliva and used a big rock for a tablet. That’s not to mention that he used his finger as a pen.

I spent a lot of time that year staring at the corner of the room—my very own Purgatory, as it was—while she continued to enslave her remaining minions, making them fit those damn letters between the lines on page after page of Goldenrod paper until several students had to be carried off to the art room and force-fed some paste before they snapped back to reality.

Evil, that woman.

Life through my early teens was pretty much normal in the penmanship department until I was introduced to my first typewriter. It was a big, old manual-style typewriter that was missing a key or two, giving it a leering, toothless grin. I learned to type on that monster. You had to step back 20 or 30 yards, get a good running start and leap on it with both hands to get it to peck at the paper, but it produced documents somewhat neater than my ransom note-style of writing could ever hope to turn out.

Then, in college, along came the computer…your friend and mine (yes, I had friends who had TRS computers back in the eighties, but they were also the kids who spent their school years getting stuffed into lockers and being given “swirlies” in the john – and wasn’t about to be one of them).

The computer allowed us to type reams and reams of worthless drivel, make and easily correct mistakes, use fancy fonts and put pictures of our dogs into our term papers. For us writers, it became our virtual notepad, our endless canvas where we could feel free to make obscene verb choices and to let our participles dangle. We could even feel free to be obtuse—or as Les Nessman would say, “rounded at the free end”—with correct type only as far away as the backspace key.

This computer fad – as some of the blue hairs called it then – never faded away. In fact, most of us wouldn’t dream of sitting down to write an actual letter to save our very lives. We’ll happily sit down and pound out a windy email on most any topic, but will we actually grasp a pen and put it to paper? Never!

Recently, I have realized, with a certain amount of horror, that I have nearly forgotten how to write with a standard pencil and paper. While in the checkout line at the supermarket, I sometimes actually struggle to write a check. Signing a simple Christmas or birthday card is a chore and writing a grocery list is just pure torture. I am so used to being able to back up, revise my thought, correct mistakes and then move on only when it’s perfect, the act of actually writing by hand is frightening.

In fact, this past holiday season while trying to hand-write a note in a Christmas card, I suddenly found myself nearly chewing my tongue off while trying to scratch out a simple note. If I had been under any more pressure, I’m afraid I would have had a third-grade flashback and begun winging spitballs and making gross noises with my armpit. When you’re only writing maybe 20 words, it’s pretty bad when you make three mistakes that need to be scratched out. Where’s the backspace key when you need it?

Being of the writer ilk, I used to take my tattered journal out to a riverbank, toss a line in and sit pouring my soul into my little book while nature did the natural thing around me. Now, I’d strongly consider lugging along my Dell and a cigarette lighter power adapter attachment to sit in my truck near a river and surf Facebook or YouTube. I still have all the same “writerly” thoughts I had way back when. It’s just that my medium for getting them from the scary recesses of my head to the paper is totally electronic now.

In fact, I find it hard to actually even be creative any longer with a pen and paper. I get the ideas, sure, but they don’t flow out unless I am behind a keyboard, squinting at my screen and drumming my feet on the floor under my desk.

I sometimes wonder now whatever became of that evil woman. I could go on about the ways in which she is permanently ensconced in my childhood memories, but that’s not the point (at least not for this column). If I had to guess, I would say most likely she was summoned back to whatever fiery pit from which she originally sprang forth. That is, after she tortured another generation or two of kids who fell into her clutches after I moved on.

My whole point here is that despite her pure evil nature, that third-grade teacher might actually have had a point. While not as important as it used to be—at least for many professional pursuits these days—penmanship does still have a place. I guess she actually she taught me something on those long spring days when a young boy’s fancy turns to kickball and to laying claim to the top rung on the monkey bars.

Good penmanship is an art and that no matter how far we go with this whole technology thing, we’re still going to have to scratch our names every now and then, so it pays to not totally eschew the lowly pen and paper.

Then again, I could just get a tablet PC…